The slit in the curtain opened as in giving birth, and out trotted not only Lane Lawlor but Frank’s own child Holly. She twirled in her white cowgirl boots and ten-gallon hat. A roar went forth from the audience. Frank had no idea Lane was so popular. Where have I been? he asked himself as the crowd around him began to flow upward into a standing ovation. Frank stood too. He didn’t have the nerve to leave his arms at his sides. Instead, he raised his hands and held them, palms in proximity as if clapping. Lane patted the air in downward motions of his arms to ask shyly for quiet. The fact that he was a big clumsy man seemed to help him. For a moment the audience was having none of it. They defied his request and cheered louder. He let his arms hang at his sides and dropped his chin modestly. At length, the noise subsided and everyone settled into their chairs. Holly darted everywhere, keeping the energy high. To Frank, she seemed to be having a fit.
As Lane moved to the microphone and made a few practiced adjustments, Holly softly played “The Streets of Laredo” behind him on the piano. She faded out as he began to speak. Very quietly he said, “Montana is not a zoo.” The audience boomed its response. Frank looked around in alarm. One large man behind him was pulling his mouth apart by the corners and emitting a terrifying whistle. There were numerous gimme caps flung into the air, though as of yet none of the more expensive cowboy hats.
About six rows over, Frank spotted Sheriff Hykema. Lane muttered away as if talking to himself, about how it was not our obligation to provide comfortable housing for animals that had lost the talent for survival in our modern world. “Hey,” he said, “if you can’t hack it, here’s the door!” This produced general, respectful applause. Then Lane stepped back from the microphone and, profiling himself to the audience, tossed his head back and howled like a wolf. They knew what he meant by that! A roar of laughter blended imperceptibly with more applause. “Fern-feelin’ prairie fairies gonna getcha!” he said, then joined their good-natured laughter, tried to get serious and dropped his forehead to the microphone helplessly. He lifted his head and aimed his mouth at the ceiling and called out, “God, can you tell me, ’cause no one down here can: why do these out-of-staters want us to have a system in Montana which has failed in Russia?” The pandemonium produced by this question was slow in subsiding. “And as far as the federal government goes, there’s more gunfire in a Washington, D.C., playground on a good day than there was in a month in Dodge City in eighteen hunnert and seventy-five!”
“Yeah!” they shouted back at him.
“Read your history!”
“Yeah!”
“Listen to your conscience!”
“Yeah!”
“Let me make it simple for them sonsofbitches: we’re the good people; they’re the bad people!”
“That’s right!”
“I wanta tell you. The cold, cool waters of the West are flowing from her wounds. They are leaving Montana while I’m talking to you. What wouldn’t I give to dam the smallest one, that creek a little child jumps across. If you are unlucky enough to run into someone who wants those rivers flowing elsewhere”— here Lane took a suspenseful pause —“gut-shoot them at the border.” A roar went up. Holly struck thunderous chords on the piano. “Gut-shoot them at the border!” Another roar, another howl from the piano. “Gut-shoot them at the border!”
Some crazed-looking woman was climbing up over the front of the stage. She struggled to her feet. “Hey, lady, the evening is still young,” Lane sang into the PA system. He inverted his palms near his face like Jack Benny. The audience laughed out a kind of encouragement. The crazy woman staggered for balance across the stage while Lane backed away in mock terror. Then Frank saw: it was Gracie! Was she in on this too? Gracie strode across the stage to the piano and yanked Holly to her feet. A sound from the indignant crowd swept forward.
Frank stood up. Holly was struggling with her mother under the cones of light from the overhead grid. Lane was doing a ringside commentary: “You’ve got to choose sometime, Holly … Folks, I’d like you to meet Gracie Copenhaver, owner-operator of the now defunct left-wing hot-tubbers’ hangout Amazing Grease. Remember, the Constitution guarantees your rights even when a parent tries to abrogate them. Folks, what’s happening to my piano player? Looks like Mama’s in a world of hurt. You call that an excuse? Holly, you’re younger and stronger. You have the Bill of Rights on your side! You have the Fifth Amendment! Don’t let your mother drag you down into the kind of life she has created for herself!”
Frank was on his feet, shoving people out from in front of him. One rancher seized his arm and Frank knocked it loose, hard. He climbed up and over the stage’s apron, gripping the nonskid carpeting on the stage, the shadow of the microphone across his back. As soon as he had his feet under him, he dove straight into the middle of Lane Lawlor, pummeling him as they went down. The sound from the crowd was like that from a provoked animal. It rolled over Frank like a gust or an ocean wave. That was all he saw. In the flooding darkness, he remembered the long-ago trip to Utah when he’d argued with Gracie and Holly played dead in the pool. They were together again. “Holly!” he called into the mountain of denim. “Gracie!”
49
He felt his lips. They had become objective facts, cracked and swollen. He made a squeamish perusal of his head with his fingertips: nothing really horrible, no stitches, but a dull ache at the very back of his head, a traditional boot target.
There was a breakfast tray beside him. Who brought it? It looked wonderful. He thought, Some nice person brought me my breakfast. He felt love just sort of leaving him and going into space. There was the Journal rolled up beside it. How good. There were three codeine tablets with water; someone had anticipated his present headache. He swallowed them. And now for the world.
The news of the world was full of failure and miscues. Ford was recalling 641,562 Aerostar minivans. Currency traders were dumping the pound. Japanese trust banks’ pretax profits plunged. The criminal investigation of Salomon Brothers continued. Bond prices slipped again. The usual remedies for jump-starting the economy were not succeeding. I know why, thought Frank. It’s because we’re disheartened. We bought all the stuff, we shit in the nest, we don’t believe in anything. How dare you jump-start us with reduced interest rates! We’re the folks who butt-fucked the goose that laid the golden egg! We can no longer be jump-started!
There was a strong tread on the stairs. “Mr. Copenhaver?” came a voice in the pause between audible steps.
“Yes, who is it?”
“It’s Brad Taylor, Mr. Copenhaver. I’m with Security Merchant Bank.” There was no further sound.
“That’s my bank,” Frank called back suspiciously. And this, he thought, was what was known in my father’s day as a young whippersnapper.
“I have Dr. Jensen down here with me. Who would you like to see first?”
“How the hell should I know? I don’t know why I would need a doctor and I don’t know who you are.”